David sloan wilson neighborhood project 6th grade

David sloan wilson neighborhood project 6th grade: David Sloan Wilson is president

Buy the book ». If only the book were more convincing—and appropriately titled, too. He managed, as the best scientists rarely do, to demystify the science without dumbing it down. He heads off the State University of New York at Binghamton campus to launch a survey of schoolchildren, gathering their perceptions of their neighborhoods and their interactions with each other and adults, and then exploring correlations between these perceptions and patterns of crime and blight.

These local scenes are interspersed with chapters on questions about how to reconcile religious and scientific understandings of reality or why the jolt of the global financial crisis led to soul searching in the world of elite economics. Think Jared Diamond meets Hunter S. Thompson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who makes an extended cameo.

Even for the intellectually adventurous reader, it is a scenic route, with mind-bending digressions that make the main thread hard to follow. This is questionable and far more risky than Wilson seems aware. A host of cooperation and conflict patterns and other dynamics in which community organizers, mayors, philanthropists, and others routinely engage may or may not reflect evolutionary processes.

Wilson never makes a convincing case for his premise, and he shows little understanding, for example, of real estate markets and how they shape residential settlement or public and private disinvestment.